


liquid stardust

by popsky



Category: Free!
Genre: Drabble, Gen, i literally ship this thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:53:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2483726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popsky/pseuds/popsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haru doesn't mind drowning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	liquid stardust

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'ed by Amariys. ♥

 

_it is the rust of iron_

_your flesh is soaked in._

 

* * *

 

 

When he was small, Haru thought the world was placed upside-down.

 

There is an indefinite depth in the sky, like a well that digs down to unknown nothingness, a stretch of light blue slowly turning into pitch black, vast and entirely bottomless. The stars are there in the ocean: a myriad of galaxies visible under the entire glittering surface, swaying gently with the waves and beckoning him, _come closer, come deeper, you will see_. He wasn’t old enough to be aware that human breaths had bounds, and he came back to consciousness in his mother’s arms and a lungful of saltwater.

 

He started learning how to swim.

 

After that, his beliefs had been turned upside-down, too.

 

On the ground, he feels like breathing gravel to the neck of hourglass: each drop weighing him down into absolute surety that the air asphyxiates him; it _limits_ his time, restricts his every inhale to small sucks of sandpaper between his teeth, and his every exhale slowly weakens into sighs, like parched air from dried out lungs. There is something about people’s fixation—on his behavior, the way he speaks, the way his face should be arranged—that there is claustrophobia suffocating his chest and drowns his entire being.

 

He lives on, however—Haru never minds drowning.

 

The water doesn’t limit him, here, in the world of liquid stardust gently constellating themselves into the very lines of his body, a second skin that lets him move as he pleases, wordless and compliant. Here, the sand drops away from his stomach and rolls around pleasantly in the crevasses of his toes, filling the spaces he doesn’t know emptied for days _(years),_ and his breath slowly fades into nothing, head blissfully empty, content in the fulfilled longing that circulates warmly in his vessels, lack of oxygen notwithstanding and inconsequential.

 

Human bodies have a thing called _weight,_ there, on the land—but here, he is always _floating_ , and Haru doesn’t want to know how a person can drown and swim and, at the exact same time, just float and do absolutely nothing _._

 

It feels like freedom, to do all of them at once.

 

Later, though: after his friends finish teasing him about the barely-subliminal repertoire of affection he shows to the pleasant, protective wetness between his skin and the air, they do what other people fail to: there are four collective splashes from all directions around him as if they are trying to dissolve him along with the tightness in his chest into the water, and to each other.

 

Haru (feels like he could) smile.

 

This feels like freedom, too.

 

 

* * *

 

_and it is liquid stardust_

_that glows_ _under your skin._

 


End file.
